


come home with me.

by lorekeepings



Series: in another life. (dimitri/byleth.) [2]
Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Alternate Universe - Role Reversal, F/M, feral!byleth
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-02
Updated: 2020-04-02
Packaged: 2021-03-01 03:47:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,390
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23448772
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lorekeepings/pseuds/lorekeepings
Summary: “come home with me,” he tells her, his eyes emulating her sorrow. “come home with me and help me reclaim faerghus, and when i am on the throne, i will be able to give you what you need to make this right.”   /   in which dimitri finds byleth in garreg mach five years after the promise. role reversal au.
Relationships: Dimitri Alexandre Blaiddyd/My Unit | Byleth
Series: in another life. (dimitri/byleth.) [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1684360
Comments: 4
Kudos: 142





	come home with me.

**Author's Note:**

> another installation in this series! i'm having a really good time writing all these aus. as usual, if you want to leave me a tip or commission me, my cashapp is $motherconjurer and my twitter is @CANTATRICKS. please be sure to check out the other works in this series-- i really like the premise of this byleth, though, so i may expand a bit more on this universe as well. i'll keep you posted!

Garreg Mach was a strange and unwelcoming place these days; perhaps it was the warmer temperatures in comparison to the Faergan forests, or perhaps it was the fact that he looked upon it with such graciousness and kindness even in its debilitated state. For five years, he has been running— hiding from the ghosts of the people he has murdered and the people who died for him. The dead call to the young prince, laughing and taunting his battered body. 

Five years have passed since he made a promise, and Dimitri Alexandre Blaiddyd does not go back on his word.

He arrives in a fur coat, clutching the silvered lance as a walking stick as he pushes himself through the treacherous terrain of the monastery. He remembers being young and leading a horse through this dangerous terrain when it was not in his best interest to ride; it has been a very long time since he has ridden a horse into battle or through territory as awful as this. He doesn’t know if he misses it or not.

The plates of his armor click against the polished marble rubble as he climbs up the stairs and to the front of the excavation. Even though the sun shone down on him, he shivered against the cold wind of the second floor of the monastery. It is dangerously quiet here in the mountains, and Dimitri is on guard— even though Dedue’s sacrifice ensured his survival, he does not hold it past petty thieves and squabbling mercenaries to vy for his head.

The wind howls like a lone wolf, and his breath is taken away as he looks up.

Shrunken down behind what appears to be a man-made lean-to, her head tucked into her knees, is a woman with soft, muted green hair. A shuddering breath leaves him as he looks her over, and his presence causes her to look up. Though her pupils dilate, she does not show him any emotion, but this does not surprise him. Professor Byleth Eisner has always been an emotionless woman, only crying during times of personal grief or smiling when she was genuinely, truly happy. Dimitri never minded— he had always taken the time to treasure her gifts when she gave them to him.

“Are you here,” the professor asked him, fingers loosely gripped around the Sublime Creator’s Sword. Her lips, dry and cracked, wrap around each word like they are poisonous. She hangs onto the words briefly, speaking shortly so they cannot hurt her anymore. “To haunt me, like the others?”

“Professor,” he whispers softly in response, taking steps towards her. With each step, his field of vision shifts, and she is able to be bathed in the same forgiving light that he had been bathed in over the last five years. “What has happened to you?”

What  _ had  _ happened to her? She pretends not to know the answer to the question, but the darkness had not been kind to her— Sothis had given her power to see the time before and after the present, and she used it well. In living out her futures over and over again, Byleth had seen the end of her days over and over again. There was no timeline in which she could save all of her beloved students, and it had grown easier and easier to kill them. Their bodies scattered about various battlefields, their lives ended because of factions and ignorance. It was not the Goddess that had failed them, she reminded herself: it was the Church. The people who existed in the shadows. And the only way to save her students was to bring them to their knees and unify them against a common enemy: those who got in her way would fall by her hand.

“Do not speak to me as if you know me, Your Majesty,” Byleth pleads with him, rising to her feet. She does not come close to speaking eye-to-eye with him due to his hulking size and her petite demeanor, but she overhauls him completely when it comes to authority. Even the future king of Faerghus could bend his knee to the Enlightened One. “I am not your Professor anymore.” Her sword-bearing hand flexes around the hilt of the Hero’s Relic, and she wonders if she is even worthy to hold that blade anymore. “I have not been in a very long time.”

“I was looking for you—” Dimitri begins, and she raises her hand to stop him. His voice catches in his throat, and a single eye gleams with shock. Did she not believe that she was on his mind the entire time, having not stopped looking for her since she disappeared? She fell off of the face of Fodlan, so of course he turned over every rock multiple times to find her. She was their professor, yes, but to him, she was— 

“You’ve wasted your time,” she informs him, her jaw setting. “I’m no  _ professor, barely a mercenary,  _ and I definitely do not  _ have the blood of the Goddess in my veins.  _ I am not  _ divine,  _ your Majesty.” Byleth’s voice doesn’t crack, but it is immediately weighed with the guilt of someone who has lived multiple lifetimes and failed in each one. Her eyes wander to his throat, wondering if the guillotine hurts before everything goes dark, or if he remembers how she took a male form and stood by Edelgard’s side as this all unraveled. (It was a last-chance plea, she reminds herself, to see if whispering in the Emperor’s ear would fight off the darkness. Even then, Byleth failed.) Yet, she finds herself returning to her first life — walking at the head of the pride, surrounded on all sides by the Blue Lions. This time, she has no kindness to offer Dimitri; perhaps it is best this way, to see the light in his eyes return. 

“I have never asked you to be any of those things,” Dimitri tells her, closing the gap between them. He towers over her, and he cloaks her in shadow so that the light does not request anything of his beloved professor. From underneath his cloak, his off-hand extends to her, the lance held loosely in his grip with the other. Byleth’s eyes flicker down to his hand, then returning to his face: he’s lying. He has asked her to be his professor, to be his guidance when the world was too loud. He has asked her to be his confidant, to offer her shoulder when the crown on his head was too heavy and it buckled. She snorts in response, brushing his hand away. When she turns away from him, his hand clasps around her arm and turns back to him.

“I have never,” he whispers to her, reminding her of their intimacy. Her cold fingers under the bags of his eyes, his lingering glances when she sipped her tea during their advising meetings. (He should have told her that he loved her sooner—maybe he could have saved her from this.) 

“What do you want, then?” She snarls at him, the Ashen Demon baring her teeth at him. Dimitri knows that expression well; lashing out against those you love in a piss-poor attempt to protect yourself from the people you think you’ll hurt. Tears streak down her cheeks, and though he is pleased to see emotion seep out of that silent heart, he hesitates to let her go to wipe them. “Do you want me to help you save the Kingdom? Put you back on your throne?”

“In time,” he tells her, his own eyes softening. (He looks better this way, Byleth thinks, his hair hanging in his face.) “But first, I want you to come home to us.”

He loosens his grip on her arm, fingers gently brushing over her reddened, pale skin. That wouldn’t bruise, he muses, but he feels horrible for gripping her in such a manner anyways. Pinning her cloak together was a blue brooch emblazoned with a silver lion’s head; he holds it between his thumb and his index finger. His thumb rubs gently over the lion’s face, and he smiles at her.  _ Until the grave,  _ he promised her once before, and he promises her again. “Come home to  _ me, _ ” he corrects himself.

“I cannot keep doing this, Dimitri,” Byleth replies, her voice softened to match his and adorned with an adoring tone. His heart blooms with the familiarity, and though he is ignorant to her multiple lives, turning back the hands of time to that fated decision at Garreg Mach in a half-baked attempt to save them all, he knows that she is home. With the Blue Lions, forever she is home. “I cannot keep killing those I love.”

“They have to pay for what they have done,” he sighs softly, bringing her hand away from herself and placing it overtop his own on his chest. “Edelgard has to pay for the chaos she has brought to us.”

“She is  _ angry! _ ” Byleth sobs, pulling her hand away and creating distance between them— the green-haired woman tries to fall back into the shadows, but Dimitri pursues, bringing her back to the light. “The Church promised things to the Empire, and that  _ creature— Rhea—  _ has taken it from her to immortalize her own name. The Emperor is  _ suffering,  _ and you want me to  _ kill her?  _ You want me to let her kill  _ you?  _ And what of the Alliance? Should I let it crumble too?”

The lance clatters to the floor, and both of Dimitri’s arms are wrapped around the professor, one hand cradling the back of her head and the other holding her waist. He is curled over her, looking deep into her soul for the answers. He wants nothing more than to put the Emperor’s head on a pike and place it in Fhirdiad for the world to see what happens when you remove the King of Faerghus from his throne. Dimitri Blaiddyd doesn’t know if he believes in the Goddess, or if he believes in the Church, but he believes in Byleth and her cold hands. 

“Come home with me,” he tells her, his eyes emulating her sorrow. “Come home with me and help me reclaim Faerghus, and when I am on the throne, I will be able to give you what you need to make this right.” His voice is hesitant, as if he is torn between wanting to march to Enbarr and slaughter Edelgard then and there and wanting to give Byleth the world on a silver platter now that he has the option to. “Please don’t make me leave you behind like I left Dedue. Don’t let there be anymore spilled Lion Blood.” 

Shuddering softly, he pulls her closer, and he hears the sound of her own weapon falling to the floor beneath them. He hides her away from the world in his large fur cloak, and his own shoulder is offered to her. The crown of a goddess is heavier than that of a king—Dimitri knows this well—and she must be so strong for enduring it for so long. From the Ashen Demon to a professor to the Enlightened One of Seiros… he wonders if her humanity is disappearing like his did once upon a dream. The sound of her nails against the metal plate of his own armor, dark and encompassing, isn’t pleasant, but as he feels her body shake, he wants nothing more than to bring her closer.

Byleth has never had a heartbeat; even in their talks of humanity and health before she had left him, he knew of her irrational physiology. Their knees buckle, overcome with the weight of their own mutually-assured destruction, and her hands shake as she clings to him. Unable to find a grip because of the metal, she looks up to him, holding his face in her hands as he keeps her from falling onto the floor below. She did not get to hold him in the last life she spent with him, for she became the Archbishop of the Church and tried to amend the world by herself. She cannot keep doing this by herself, she decided.

“Tell me my name,” she pleads with him, as if she is drowning at sea and begging for a life preserver. The question throws Dimitri for a loop, but he doesn’t break his gaze at her. Fingers tighten in sea-foam colored and hold up her body by the waist.

“You are Byleth Eisner,” Dimitri whispers to her, his voice uncharacteristically soft as it has been this entire time. His hand moves from her hair, brushing her bangs out of her face so that he may look at her properly. “Professor at Garreg Mach Officer’s Academy, First of Her Name, and Wielder of the Sublime Creator’s Sword. Nothing more.”

“Nothing more,” she echoes, nodding. “I quite like that.”

As he holds her in his arms, kneeling down and keeping her from falling on the hallowed floor here at the monastery, the silence that befalls them is both deafening and comforting. She looks weak, and Dimitri can’t help but wonder when the last meal she had was; when the last slumber in an actual bed was; when the last time someone held her and reminded her of her mortality. He is nothing more than a beast in man’s clothing; he is aware of this. But Byleth— how someone so divine can be reduced to a shaking animal in the shadows of an abandoned home… it drives him mad.

“Come home with me,” he pleads with her, his thumb gently wiping the tears from her cheeks. “Come home with me, and let me give you a new Church. Don’t go too far, and we will be able to return Fodlan to its former glory. If the Church has harmed Edelgard like you claim, and her anger is justified, then we can help her, if she will listen to us. Come home with me, Byleth, and let me be yours.”

Her body falls slack in his arms, and she smiles at him, softly. “I did not get to take your last name the last time I lived this life,” she tells him, his brow furrowing in concern. “I would quite like that, when the war is over.”

“As I said, my beloved. I will be yours.”


End file.
